8.3 Multi-signature vault
Blockchain technology has enabled decentralization beyond digital asset management. Decentralized governance is another popular field of study. Participating in any kind of vote can be an opaque process. Whether it is a vote for the most popular song on the radio or for an elected government official, participants cannot verify whether the process is fair or the results are genuine. DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) can change this. A DAO is a smart contract that facilitates decision-making on behalf of its members.
It can be complex, with multiple levels of management, asset delegation, and member management. Some DAOs have tokens that represent ownership or access rights. A set of smart contracts can translate most aspects of a conventional corporate structure into enforceable bylaws on the blockchain. DAOs have great potential.
Our project involves creating a simplified DAO that enables members to vote on which principal can withdraw the DAO's token balance. The DAO will be initialized upon deployment, and members can then vote for or against specific principals. The contract deployer can only initialize the contract and then let it run its course. During the initialization call, the members (a list of principals) and the number of votes required to withdraw the balance will be defined.
The voting mechanism works as follows:
Members can vote yes or no for any principal.
Re-voting for the same principal replaces the previous vote.
The status of a vote can be checked by anyone, and all votes for a specific principal can be tallied by anyone.
Once a principal reaches the required number of votes, it can withdraw the tokens.
To define the contract owner and error codes, we start with the usual constants. Three failures can be foreseen during the initialization step:
someone other than the owner is trying to initialize,
the vault is already locked,
or the initializing call specifies an amount of votes required that is larger than the number of members.
The voting process will fail only if a non-member attempts to vote. The withdrawal function will succeed only if the voting threshold has been reached.
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